Ready to book toggle

Our team are having issues with this feature as well. ​@Dentally Community Moderator they should have fed back to your support team directly.

Thank you both - I am waiting for a response from the product team, and will get back to you here as soon as I hear back from them!

Hi both, I'm a product manager in the Dentally team. Thank you for your feedback.

We appreciate this is a slight change to your previous workflows - this is intentional, with the purpose of making it easier for receptionists to see exactly which appointments are actually ready. Based on feedback from many practices, previously receptionists might book appointments incorrectly, or miss appointments completely, because it wasn't clear which were ready for booking. This change makes clinicians’ intention explicit, so receptionists can have confidence in what they see, without having to check or chase - ultimately reducing the amount of admin and back-and-forth. It also gives managers more reliable insight into the quantity of unbooked appointments in your practice.

Practices already implementing this change have seen a notable increase in their booking conversion and same day booking rates, so while we understand it's an additional step in your workflow, it has a significant impact on the practice as a whole.

We want to hear your feedback so please do share below if you or any other users have anything else to add.

I think the problem with this analysis is it takes a previous one-size fits all approach and replaces it with another. So in short you’ve probably solved the frustrations of one set of users only to introduce frustrations to another set. The users who were frustrated previously would have been the loudest voices by default, as they were the aggrieved - the users happy with the previous setup would not have been raising feedback with you.

That could easily be overcome by adding some flexibility to the feature, e.g. allowing individual clients to choose if they want it, or if they want it to default to a certain position (on or off).

Yes if we could have it set by default to ‘ready to book’ that would fix the issue. 

Thank you both for the insight - it would be helpful to have a chat with you to understand your practice's experience and perspective - I've DM'd you both so it would be great to chat if you're happy to.

it worked just fine the way it was .. it would be easier to ‘default ‘ ready to book and toggle not ready if needed !!! why does dentally change things that don't need changing !! A simple Refund button option would be better and more beneficial to the reception team ! 

I must agree that I was surprised when this feature was introduced. If receptionist aren’t told what appointment to book next for a patient that indicates poor communication between clinician and front desk; not a PMS issue.

May I ask if there has been a resolution to the original question? Is it possible to disable the ‘ready to book’ feature all together? 

+1 am also finding this new feature annoying and time consuming.   More clicks = more time to get things done.  Have an option to disable this feature pls. 

We are also finding this in our setting! This feature in idea sound great, but when you have an extensive treatment plan with multiple appointments, clicking the toggle for each appointment is SO TIME CONSUMING. I agree, either default as ready to book, or an optional setting to have on or off. 

So I don't see it mentioned anywhere but yesterday I find a new feature under settings / user / clinician name and there is now a toggle switch to enable or disable this feature of showing unbooked treatments.  

Shame it was not promoted.  

Hi ​@BCDC2023 - the setting you spotted is in testing at the moment which is why you’ve found it! 

Please be assured I will update this thread once I have the full details from the product team, I wanted to hold off until they had tested it to ensure you were given clear and up-to-date information. I will update here once I know more :)